Michael Ross: Canada doesn’t need ‘Canadian CIA.’ It needs better

In an interview reported last week, Arthur T. Porter, chairman of the Canadian intelligence-community watchdog agency known as the Senate Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), stated that a Canadian CIA is not needed.

“You have to recognize that [by spying] you are probably breaking [some other country’s] law by just the definition of what you’re doing,” he said in his first interview since becoming chairman of SIRC. “It’s also incredibly expensive to set that sort of apparatus up. I’m just not sure that we’re ready to go in that direction at this time.”

The National Post headline on the article was “Canadian CIA not needed: Official.” When the point is phrased that way, I would agree: The last thing our intelligence community needs is a bloated, risk-averse, turf-war-mired bureaucracy where some 90% of employees operate domestically, as is now the case with the CIA. What we do need in Canada is a small, nimble, and effective overseas intelligence service that conducts covert information-gathering on the capabilities, intentions and activities of rogue states, transnational terrorist groups and other foreign entities before they appear on our door-step.

A case in point is the recent and sudden regime change in North Africa. Well-placed sources in those countries may have given us a hint of what was about to occur; or at least, which direction events were taking. Unfortunately, Canada now stands as one of the few Western nations without overseas case officers conducting clandestine information-gathering on threats affecting our national security.

Dr. Porter, who according to SIRC’s website, “brings a unique blend of medical practice, finance and business experience to health-care leadership” and his four colleagues on the committee (whose backgrounds are also about as far-removed from the intelligence realm as possible), balk at what they see as the prohibitive cost of setting up an overseas intelligence service. But in the scheme of national security expenditures, a spy agency can be set-up for a fraction of the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet.

The business of spying is a lot less complicated and expensive than many think. It’s the world’s second oldest profession, after all. When broken down to its basics, it merely involves tasking spies to make contact with foreigners who have access to intelligence that we need. It’s not rocket science.

The most common counter-arguments to creating our own spy agency is that we already possess one in CSIS. While it is true that CSIS has a mandate to counter threats overseas should they appear, CSIS is primarily a domestic security service with little in the way of mandate or experience to conduct foreign intelligence gathering on a full-time professional basis. Many of the people with information vital to our national security don’t come to Canada — or, for security and other reasons — cannot leave their own country.

What about our diplomats and their in-country channels of communication? Fictional portrayals notwithstanding, diplomats and spies do not move in the same circles; and, more importantly, diplomats are routinely, if not constantly, put under surveillance by their host countries’ security services — even in friendly nations.

The other argument is that we have good multilateral relationships with allied intelligence services, which share their information with us. But what if another country has to weigh our interests against theirs when it comes to sensitive intelligence that they gathered and don’t feel like sharing? Moreover, how does it look when a country as rich, advanced and strategically important as Canada has no qualms about asking its allies’ spies to endure extreme risk and hardship because we’re too law-abiding and cheap to do it ourselves?

Domestic security services such as CSIS are not spy agencies. They operate on home turf with all the powers and support of the state behind them — including, in Canada’s case, the long arm of the RCMP should things go awry. To coin a metaphor, CSIS can be thought of as a good gamekeeper; but what Dr. Porter and the other committee members need to realize is that, in our world of political instability, terrorist threats and non-conventional weapons proliferation, Canada also needs a few good poachers operating on foreign soil as well.
National Post

“Michael Ross” is a former deep-cover officer with the Israel Secret Intelligence Service (Mossad).